Introduction:

             On Social Suffering and Its Cultural Construction

                                                by

         Jeffrey C. Alexander and Elizabeth Butler Breese


This book deals with social suffering, with exploitation and violence, with war and genocide, the
massacre of innocents, and intense and often gruesome religious, economic, ethnic, and racial
strife. These formidable topics do not in themselves render our book distinctive. What
distinguishes the contributions that follow is how they approach social suffering’s causes and
effects. While they are deeply sensitivity to the materiality and pragmatics of social suffering,
they reject materialist and pragmatic approaches for one centered inside a cultural sociology.

Material forces are, of course, deeply implicated in social suffering, and the practical
considerations surrounding traumatic events have significant effects on social organization. Here
we are concerned, however, to trace the manner in which these causes and effects are crucially
mediated by symbolic representations of social suffering and how such a cultural process channels
powerful human emotions. We demonstrate how symbolic-cum-emotional forces are carried by social
groups and how together they create powerful, history-changing effects in the worlds of morality,
materiality, and organization. Intellectuals, artists, and social movement leaders create
narratives of social suffering. They project these as new ideologies that create new ideal
interests. Such ideologies and interests can trigger significant repairs in the civil fabric or
instigate new rounds of social suffering in turn.

We approach this process of symbolic-cum-emotional representation as a collective, sociological
process centering on meaning-making. The construction of collective trauma is often fuelled by
individual experiences of pain and suffering, but it is the threat to collective rather than
individual identity that defines the kind of suffering at stake. The pivotal question becomes, not
who did this to me, but what group did this to us? Intellectuals, political leaders, and symbol
creators make different claims about collective identity, about the nature of the wound and what
caused it, about the identity of victim and perpetrator, and about what is to be done to prevent
the trauma ever from happening again. Conflicting accounts weave protagonist and antagonist into
powerful accusatory narratives and project these to audiences of third parties.

Which narrative wins out is not only a matter of performative power. It is also a matter of power
and resources, and the demographics of the audiences who are listening. Who can command the most
effective platform to tell the trauma story? Some stories are repressed, while others are
materially sustained. Some stories are enriched by long-standing traditions; others seem so
counterintuitive as scarcely to be believed. Some trauma narratives find willing, able, and
homogeneous audiences; other stories are received by fragmented or constricted audiences; still
others simply fall on deaf ears.

The emotional experience of suffering is critical, but it is not primordial. To find the meaning of
suffering, it must be framed against background expectations. Individual suffering is of
extraordinary human, moral, and intellectual concern; in itself, however, it is a matter for
psychologists and psychoanalysts, not for the sociological contributors to this book. We are
concerned with traumas that become collective, and they can become so only if they are conceived as
wounds to social identity. This is a matter of intense cultural and political work. Suffering
collectivities – whether dyads, groups, societies, or civilizations – do not exist simply as
material networks. They must be imagined into being.

When social processes construe events as gravely dangerous to groups, social actors transform
individual suffering into a matter of collective concern, of cultural worry, group danger, social
panic, creeping fear. Individual victims react to traumatic injury with repression and denial,
gaining relief when these psychological defenses are overcome, bringing pain into consciousness so
they are able to mourn. For collectivities, it is different. Rather than denial, repression, and
working through, it is a matter of symbolic construction and framing, of creating a narrative and
moving along from there. A “we” must be constructed via narrative and coding, and it is this
collective identity that experiences and confronts the danger. Perhaps thousands of people have
been killed. Individuals have lost their lives, experiencing intense suffering and pain. These are
individual facts. Beyond this point, collective processes of cultural framing decides. Are the
massive deaths seen as sacrifices for a legitimate war? Americans who sent soldiers to triumphal
victory in the First and Second World Wars did not experience collective trauma, despite the tens
of thousands of deaths to men and women they loved and lost. Neither did Germans during their early
Blitzkriegs. The reason was that these lost lives, far from endangering American and German
collective identities, actually reinforced them. It is when narratives of triumph are challenged,
when individual deaths seem worthless or polluted, when those who have fallen are seen not as
sacrificing for a noble cause but as wasted victims of irresponsible chicanery, that wars can
become traumatic indeed (Giesen 2004).

To transform individual suffering into collective trauma is cultural work. It requires speeches,
rituals, marches, meetings, plays, movies, and storytelling of all kinds. Carrier groups tie their
material and ideal interests to particular scripts about who did what to whom, and how society must
respond if a new collective identity is to be sustained. Historical episodes of social suffering
have the potential to trigger dangerous group conflict, but also ameliorating reconciliation. Lost
wars, economic depressions, mass murders of every conceivable ethnic, racial, and religious stripe
– such social events can be understood according to drastically varying accounts and can be made to
imply sharply antithetical social prescriptions. This cultural work produces spirals of symbolic
signification, signifying processes that are mediated by institutional structures and uneven
distributions of wealth and power. Are we struggling over the nature of collective trauma in the
field of party conflict, in a court of law, in the mass media, or on a theatrical stage? Do the
cultural entrepreneurs' stories have access to the means of symbolic production? Even the most
compelling trauma narratives must reach outside themselves. Power and resources are terribly
important here, even if they alone will not decide.

In an earlier work, Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, the senior editors of this volume
helped work out a foundational theory of collective trauma.[1] We invited contributors to the
present volume to elaborate and apply this theory to new social contexts, and to revise it and
change it in their own distinctive ways. Our earlier work generated some controversy, both in its
insistence on differentiating collective from individual trauma and in its suggestion that
emotional experience is channeled via cultural processes relatively independent of the trauma’s
social origins.

We believe these foundational positions are sustained in the case studies that follow, even as new
propositions are proffered, theoretical territory extended, and new conceptual connections are
forged.


                     Individual Suffering Is Separate from Collective Representation

In their chapter on the controversial bombing war against German cities during World War II, Volker
Heins and Andreas Langenohl vividly demonstrate that massive suffering of many individuals does not
create collective trauma. They open their account by providing an overview of magnitude of the
suffering of the German people, both soldiers and civilians:

More than five million soldiers were killed, most of them on the eastern front. Those who survived
in the war in the east were often wounded, half-crazed or frostbitten, and were further decimated
by the harsh conditions in Soviet POW camps. British and American bombers attacked more than one
hundred German cities and town, reducing many of them to a sea of rubble, killing around
six-hundred-thousand civilians, and making many more homeless. Millions of ethnic Germans who had
settled in Poland or Czechoslovakia fled the onslaught of the Red Army, or were expelled by the
newly established communist governments. On their way to Berlin and in the fallen capital itself,
Soviet soldiers raped altogether perhaps one and a half million women.


In the immediate postwar period, and indeed for many years afterward, individuals recorded these
massive sufferings in photographs, in personal diaries, and in family conversations, and often made
these public.  In heavily bombed cities such as Hamburg, the bombardment was commemorated in local
official ceremonies.  Their painful experiences were not silenced, as some have claimed. Yet, these
representations of the bombings never amounted to an authoritative representation orienting
collective political and moral perceptions.

Why was it that the suffering experienced by Germans in this period—their individual traumatic
experiences—did not become a cultural trauma? The explanation Heins and Langenohl offer is simple
and clear: Commemorating air raids as a trauma for the national collectivity would have conflicted
with the trauma narrative postwar Germany constructed when it was occupied by those who had
perpetrated the injuries. The trauma construction in post-war Germany centered on the harm that the
Germans had done to others. The Holocaust-centered, war-guilt narrative became even stronger after
the occupation, forming the core of democratic Germany’s collective identity in the decades
afterward, right up until today. It was this new moral frame that allowed German national identity
to rise from the ashes of World War II, and it did not allow the individual injuries that millions
of Germans suffered at the hands of the Allies to become the nation’s collective narration. German
had to be represented as perpetrator; neither individual Germans nor their nation could be
portrayed as victim. It was the nation’s mass murder of the Jews, not the German people’s own
deaths, which needed constituting as the primary injury at stake.

Germans saw their own misery filtered through a sense of what had been done to others in their name
… The memory of the bombing war has not been turned into a national or ‘cultural trauma’… Germans
learned to connect their suffering to the suffering of others. They remember that their cities were
firebombed and often completely flattened by identifiable actors, but it is not this fact in itself
that is remembered and commemorated as a psychologically searing, identity-changing event … Germans
no longer felt entitled to speak of themselves as victims … The Allied bombing of German cities
during World War II – that has not become a cultural trauma, not even for the successor generations
of the victim group.[2]


Yet, while such a refusal laid the groundwork for moral redemption, it was neither sociologically
determined nor socially consensual. Many Germans commemorated their soldiers’ suffering at the
Battle of Stalingrad well into the 1960s; it was only the rise to preeminence of Holocaust memory
that made such trauma construction of German military sacrifice impossible. In the eastern city of
Dresden, so horribly destroyed by the infamous firebombing, controversial efforts by left and right
to sustain anti-American and anti-British narratives of German World War II suffering continue
today; however, as Heins and Langenohl argue, these narratives will not rise, in the foreseeable
future, to the level of symbolic condensation necessary for a cultural trauma to emerge.

            Total war, an objective event of staggering empirical significance, demands the
countless loss of individual life and enormous expenditure of national treasure. Its narration as
triumph or trauma depends, however, on whether these sacrifices are deemed to have contributed to
collective glory or to have been wasted in vain. As in post-Nazi Germany, postwar Japan considered
its national society to have been gravely wounded by defeat. Japan’s postwar storytellers did not,
however, separate the new nation from the old trauma in Germany’s radical and insistent way. In her
account of Japan’s trauma process, Akiko Hashimoto insists that empirical referent does not
determine signification.

The horrendous event emerges as a significant referent in the collective consciousness, not because
it is in some way naturally ineffaceable but because it generates a structure of discourse that
normalizes it in collective life … Wars, massacres, atrocities, invasions, and other instances of
mass violence can become significant referents for subsequent collective life not because of the
gruesome nature of the events per se, but because people choose to make them especially relevant to
who they are and what it means to be a member of that society. Some events therefore become more
crucially significant than others, because we manage to make them more consequential in later years
for our understanding of ourselves and our own society. (original italics)


Hashimoto devotes attention to the supra-material symbolization of Japanese defeat.

“August 15, 1945, has come to represent not strictly the end of a military conflict,” she writes,
“but the cultural trauma of a fallen national, the collapse of the nation’s social and moral order,
and the failed aspirations of an East Asian Empire.” Yet, even while “epitomizing a rupture of
national history rather than the strictly military event"—a rupture that allows a “radical
departure from a stigmatized past”—who exactly were the traumatic event’s perpetrators and who its
victims are not determined by simply establishing such a narrative break. The autonomy of
representation and referent means that the characters of a rupture narrative can be filled in
sharply different ways: “The war was wrong, but there is also sufficient elasticity here in
assigning the blame to different agents and causes, from the Emperor and colonial aggression, to
incompetent military strategists and self-serving Western powers.”

When Rui Gao investigates Maoist reconstructions of Chinese suffering, her account also
demonstrates that individual wounds and collective representations are not by any means necessarily
intertwined. Why did Maoism largely ignore what Chinese people suffered at the hands of Japanese
armed forces during World War II? The lack of cultural construction cannot be attributed to the
dearth of painful experience. Certainly, the latter was sufficiently massive and horrible to
trigger trauma on a large scale:

The millions of Chinese people who had the misfortune of living through the War of Resistance
Against Japan (hereafter “the War”) experienced nearly unbearable trauma and pain. From 1937 to
1945, during the 8 years of the War, China lost three million lives in combat, and civilian
casualties were estimated to be about twenty million. The heinous nature of the war atrocities
committed by the invading army must have left indelible marks on the consciousness of millions of
war victims. Indeed, the notorious Nanking Massacre, the crimes of No. 731 Special Forces, and the
forced conscription of ‘comfort women’ are but three particularly atrocious cases of trauma
inflicted by the Japanese army.


In order to explain Maoism’s silence about these massively painful experiences Gao traces
symbolization, more precisely the lack thereof. “Such vivid and massively shared suffering and
injustice,” Gao writes, “remained ultimately private and individual. For many years after the
building of the People’s Republic of China, this suffering seldom found its way into the public
sphere of expression."

To understand why millions of brutal individual experiences were not translated into collective
representation, Gao examines the carrier group of postwar Chinese trauma, the nation’s
revolutionary and newly triumphant Communist party. She finds its ideal interests lay elsewhere.
Rather than create a national narrative pitting Chinese victims against war-mongering Japanese, the
ruling party focused on its own suffering and on the pain experienced by the class that it fought
to sustain. According to the revolutionary trauma narrative of Maoism, it was Chinese landlords who
inflicted collective pain, not the Japanese; and it was the party and the proletarian who were the
victims, not the Chinese people per se. These New China storytellers projected “the intense
trauma-drama of class struggle…That is, perpetrators in the old society epitomized an absolutely
evil class enemy.” If this alternative trauma story were successful, it would justify the
leadership of the communist party: The “suffering of the proletarian victims” could be “represented
symbolically and emotionally as suffering shared by a broad group of people, united regardless of
national boundaries in a new universal class collectivity.” The riddle of Maoist silence can now be
solved. It is because the “the experience of the War… ‘unfits’ with this grand narrative of ‘class
trauma’” that the “emergence of the War as a collective trauma was effectively ‘inhibited’ by the
trauma of class struggle.”[3]

            Ivana Spasic similarly separates Serbians’ actual experience of the “trauma of Kosovo”
from its symbolic figuration. “If asked what distinguishes them as a nation,” Spasic writes, “most
Serbs would tell you it is the memory of the Battle of Kosovo, fought between the Serbian army and
the forces of Ottoman Turks in 1389.” It is from this “Kosovo sore, wound or pain, as it is usually
called” that “the sorrowful but proud feeling of tragedy, death and loss engendered by remembrance”
that are “generally held to be the foundation of Serbian identity” is sustained. For her part,
Spasic questions whether that earlier traumatic event ever actually happened, at least as Serbians
have remembered it. To understand the Serbian experience of trauma, she argues, requires a cultural
turn, moving “from blood to referent.” “When referring to ‘Kosovo’,” she explains, we are speaking
of “the symbolic, abstract meaning, not Kosovo as a real place.”

Viewed as narrative rather than event, “Kosovo” is far from straight-forward. Describing “the
symbolism of Kosovo” as “ambiguous and open-ended,” Spasic finds “many gaps, loops,
double-entendres and other discursive plays.”

Trauma may be seen as a speech act, a continually discursively produced condition which stands in
mutually constitutive relations with the contextual circumstances. In this sense, it is ‘there’ as
a cultural meaning-structure, Eyerman’s “referent” or Zivkovic’s “entrenched story.”


It is the myth’s rhetorical success rather than Serbians’ actual experiences of pain that is
“responsible for the Myth’s enduring power.” Spasic challenges the idea that “trauma is actively
felt by people, that it is located somehow within them, that it affects them uniformly and
unavoidably” (original italics). Collectively constructed, trauma is located inside of cultural
structures, and it is these narratives, not the actual experience of real events, that has the
capacity to inflict collective pain: “Over the centuries, the thematic cluster of Kosovo has become
a (potentially) traumatizing interpretive framework readily available to Serbs for making sense of
their collective experiences.”

For contemporary Serbians, the paradox and tragedy of the Kosovo myth derives from this chasm
between individual experience and collective construction. In their “more personalized and private
discourse,” Spasic contends, Serbs display a “rationalism and open-mindedness” that could lay the
basis for more “realistic” foreign relations. Today, however, “with the verbal stakes rising, it
has become all but impossible to talk about Kosovo, real as well as symbolic, in anything but the
most elevated tone.” The result is that, while “people harbor all kinds of doubts and grudges
against the symbolic prevalence of Kosovo and its impingements on current Serbian politics,” they
“feel extremely uncomfortable expressing them in public, or even to themselves, because the
sacredness of the topic has been so extremely enhanced.”

The distinction between private experiences of suffering, shame, and defeat and the public
expression, signification, and symbolization of trauma stands at the core of Nicolas Demertzis's
history of the social and political aftermath of the Greek civil war (1944-1949, though, as
Demertzis advises, this periodization is controversial). The suffering brought about by the bloody
war among members of the same national and ethnic community, Demertzis explains, was
linguistically, emotionally, and politically difficult—and for a time impossible—to publicly
express in Greece. Regarding individual, psychological trauma, we speak of the repression of
memories and experiences. Cultural traumas, as not only Demertzis but also Bartmanski and Eyerman
in their chapter on the Katyn Massacre explain, may follow such periods of silence, exclusion, and
oblivion. Private pain and loss can be excluded from the public realm and silenced by the state, as
in the case of the Katyn Massacre. In Greece, however, "the veil of silence was socially imposed
but not directly enforced by a repressive state apparatus." The social forces imposing the "veil of
silence" were effective nevertheless. The conflict was not given a name, was not even signified in
the weakest sense. Without a public vocabulary or public recognition, individuals experienced shame
and confusion within their most intimate spheres: their families.

Demertzis's chapter begins with a moving account of his "hard-working" and "honest" father's
inability to answer the opaque yet crushing accusations of previously-committed sins leveled by his
elder son. In the cultural trauma of the Katyn Massacre too, Bartmanski and Eyerman explain, the
family plays a crucial role.  The family is the site of grieving for a lost father, brother, or
husband and it is a unit isolated from society; the truth of the identity of the perpetrators,
known to most if not all of the families, was aggressively distorted by the state and concealed in
public life.  Families who lost a member in the Katyn Massacre and participants in the Greek civil
war hold memories and emotions as individuals and as families that may become part of the cultural
collective trauma once the political or social climate allows for public symbolization and wider
signification.  The period of silence, exclusion, and oblivion is not only a period of being "on
hold"; such prevention of more public narrations may become part of the broader social trauma
itself.  Indeed, Bartmanski and Eyerman find their title in the words of the daughter of a man
killed at Katyn: "the worst was the silence." As both Bartmanski and Eyerman's and Demertzis's
studies make clear, it was not certain in either case that individual and family experience would
become traumas for the broader collectivity.  Not all silences become spoken; not all personal
anguish becomes collective trauma.

            The chapters about trauma construction in Colombia and South Africa reveal the same
independence of collective construction from personal experience, a separation that allows not only
for moral reckoning but for these lessons to be pushed in more inclusive or more reactionary
directions.

In Colombia, writes Carlo Tognato, the battle waged by the left-wing FARC against the Colombian
state constitutes the longest-standing guerilla conflict in the world, and it is largely financed
from kidnappings that have imposed extraordinary individual suffering on the Colombian people.
“Just between January 1996, and June 2008,” according to Tognato, “approximately
twenty-four-thousand people have been kidnapped,” and “by June 2008, almost three thousand were
still in the hands of their captors and almost fourteen hundred had died in captivity.” Yet,
despite these extraordinary afflictions, “Colombians have been traditionally quite indifferent to
the suffering of the kidnap victims.”

In a letter to his family, one of the kidnapped, Coronel Mendieta, writes: “It is not physical pain
that paralyzes me, or the chains around my neck that torment me, but the mental agony, the evil of
the evil and the indifference of the good, as if we were not worth anything, as if we did not
exist.”


It is not inevitable that massive individual suffering will produce a collective trauma process,
much less an ameliorating social narrative to repair social fragmentation. “The Colombia case bears
witness,” Tognato observes, “to the fact that the view of human suffering does not automatically
trigger solidarity for the victims.” Yet, while not automatic, it remains possible. Tognato
describes how dramatic new symbolic performances by anti-kidnapping demonstrators and civil
activists have challenged Colombia’s desperate political situation in progressive and democratic
ways.

            In his examination of refugees in South Africa, Ari Sitas addresses the pain Africans
have suffered in post-colonial societies. “Since 1994, a stream of refugees has arrived in South
Africa from a number of conflict zones on the African continent,” and they have “fled from
frightening scenes of violence and war in their countries.” Sitas conceptualizes the most outspoken
and politicized among these refugees as, at least potentially, an intellectual carrier group. He
interprets their discourse as an effort to give meaning to the suffering of their fellow citizens,
reading their political demands as efforts to repair the searing strains that undermine peace in
the nations from which they flee. In their speeches and writings, members of this carrier group in
status ascendi speak of “isikhala—a polysemic word which borders almost on the Marxian concept of
alienation, of homelessness, pain and suffering.” As Sitas understands it, however, this discourse
about pain “is not [about] a personal experience,” not about “what happened to the individual… as
such.” Instead, “the performance listed general details—the kind of misdeeds, rapes, hackings,
stabbings, burnings, shootings, bombs that happened.” Yet, even as “the killer neighbor … is
invoked” in a generalized and abstract manner, there is “a question left hanging.” It is this: “Who
put the knife in his or her hand?”

When their narration comes to this question, the refugees’ trauma constructions veer sharply away
from the actual experiences of victims and the actual actions of perpetrators. The spiral of
signification is deflected by the long standing trauma framework that that fuelled the African
anti-colonial movement in an earlier day. Rather than pointing to post-colonial African
perpetrators, refugees refer to “the vintage formulation” of Africa “as a continent of humanism,
sociality and equality before the European pillage.” With Africa entering the collective
imagination as pure victim, the refugees tell a story whose “key trauma [is] constructed around
slavery, racism and, after the late 19^th century imperial scramble for its resources,
colonialism.” According to Sitas, narrating the old white-man-as-perpetrator story – of “the
transatlantic experience of slavery and into the forms of forced/corvee labour on the continent of
mines and plantations—it was about the suffering of servitude and it was about real and
metaphorical bondage” – misses what must be the contemporary point.

The acknowledgement of suffering then slid invariably towards the White Man as a perpetrator in the
imaginary—nothing specific— "he" as a trans-historical entity, a Manichean counterpoint. Nothing
about the Interhamwe on Rwandan lips, of Mobutu or the various factions of the Congo, of the Derg
or the Amharas, of the Warlords was ever mentioned but a broad context of the White origins of a
suffering.


Sitas finds this “a disturbing construction” because so imagining perpetrator and victim avoids
addressing the African sources of post-colonial suffering and prevents, at the same time, a
cosmopolitan resolution. It “asserts an ‘unassimilable other-ness’ from the rest of the world,”
homogenizing the imaginary of a terribly divided continent and making wider solidarity with
outsiders impossible. Trauma, victim, and perpetrator are identified and interrelated in a
distorted and particularistic rather than realistic and morally responsible manner. While “the
interviewees agree that the agencies of violence of conflict are African and African-led,” Sitas
explains,  “the cohorts, power-elites, [and] rulers who come to benefit from it are seen as
‘corrupted’ or better, 'the corrupted.'” In this rhetorical construction, there is an abdication of
responsibility.

The inflection is important as corrupt is not so much a personal attribute as the result of
pressure from external forces. In this way, the problem of corruption is not owned but instead
fingers are pointed at inflictors of the problem—not corrupt, but corrupted.  It refuses to own
“the” problem. “They” have been victims of external forces and/or internal servants of external
forces.


This narrative points to “remote-control colonialism” as having “spawned tribalism and ethnic
strife,” ignoring Africa’s own selfish and misguided elites, the groups that are actually
responsible for the most recent impositions of trauma and pain. Such constricted trauma
construction closes off the social space for attacking contemporary African suffering, to demand
the kinds of social changes that would reconstruct African societies in more civil manner—the kind
of radical change that Sitas himself has advocated throughout his own intellectual-cum-activist
career.

            That processes of symbolic representation establish and mediate the nature of
collective suffering is the ground bass of cultural trauma theory. From it follows a series of more
specific sociological propositions: cultural agents are central, collective trauma dramas are
performed rather than simply described, and trauma dramas have material repercussions.

     Cultural Agents Are Central

Meanings do not come out of thin air.  Webs of signification are spun by culture creators. Here we
mean most centrally to point to the work of novelists, painters, poets, movie directors and
television producers, comic book scribes, and intellectuals. The category of cultural agent would
also include other kinds of publicly-oriented speech acts as well, for example, the factual claims
making of lawyers, forensic scientists, academics, and politicians. We mean to highlight, not the
epistemological status of truth claims, but the agency with which every claim to reality, whether
ostensibly factual or fictional, must be made. From a cultural-sociological perspective, the
difference between factual and fictional statements is not an Archimedean point. Cultural trauma
theory is post-foundational. Yet, while the spiral of signification is not rational, it is
intentional. The spiral is spun by individual and group carriers. It is people who make traumatic
meanings, though they do so in circumstances which they have not themselves created and which they
do not fully comprehend.

The more conservative and heroic version of postwar Japanese trauma discourse, Akiko Hashimoto
tells us, was crystallized by Yoshida Mitsuru’s best-selling non-fiction memoir Requiem for
Battleship Yamato. One of the few survivors of a tactically meaningless suicide sortie only months
before Japan’s defeat, Mitsuru dramatically recounted the naval officer Captain Usubuchi’s
emotional framing of imminent defeat as patriotic sacrifice, not only his own and his 3000 crew
members but of Japan itself. “We will lead the way,” the captain is purported to have proclaimed;
“we will die as harbingers of Japan’s new life.”  While acknowledging defeat and drawing a sharp
line in historical time, such trauma narration does not actually make Japan’s war regime impure, as
Hashimoto explains: “In Yoshida’s rendering, the courage and discipline of the men facing certain
death are emphasized, without blame or resentment directed toward the state leadership that ordered
the tactically dubious ‘special attack’ mission with no fuel to return home.” Hashimoto traces how
this conservative pattern of trauma signification, first crystallized in a best-selling book,
spiraled along the aestheticized pathways of popular culture and into the political sphere, with
immense social and political consequence.

Progressive Japanese countered this conservative, justificatory trauma reconstruction via
narratives of equally dramatic coloration. The aesthetic power of such leftist counter-narratives
made them massively popular. “At the height of the Vietnam War,” Hashimoto recounts, “an artist of
the wartime generation penned mortifying stories that would become some of the most iconic anti-war
literature in postwar Japan.” Nakazawa Keiji’s semi-autobiographical comic Barefoot Gen told the
story, not of heroic defeat in military battle, but of the tragic nuclear obliteration of a city,
Hiroshima. The narrative constructs a civil rather than military protagonist, telling the story
from the perspective of a family’s day-to-day survival after the atomic bomb:

Gen’s father and sister died in the nuclear blast under [their] collapsed house, but Gen, his
mother and brothers narrowly escaped. His mother was pregnant and gave birth to Gen’s sister on the
day of the blast amid the wreckage. Thereafter, for ten volumes, Gen survives hunger and poverty,
loss of his mother and sister, humiliation and fear, illness and discrimination, exploitation and
crimes.


Keiji’s comic novel graphically portrays the physical suffering of individuals --  “charred bodies,
people with torn skin hanging from their faces and limbs, eyeballs dangling from their sockets and
maggots hatching on corpses, heaps of burned dead bodies in the river and elsewhere all over the
scorched flattened city.” Yet Gen depicts the antagonists responsible for this suffering as forces
of a decidedly collective kind, groups whose right-wing politics must be defeated for peace to once
again reign.  “In Nakazawa’s rendering,” writes Hashimoto, “the war was brought on recklessly and
unnecessarily by the Japanese military and the Imperial state that heartlessly and ineptly misled
civilians to deathly destruction and suffering.” Gen's father, Hashimoto explains, "serves as a
spiritual background of the story," as he represents the possibility of a clear-eyed comprehension
and rejection of the Imperialist forces that invited the violence upon its own people. This
left-wing political understanding is not made didactically via truth claims but aesthetically, via
narrative resolution. Psychological identification with an esteemed moral protagonist allows the
civil anti-war argument to be made and a new, more critical moral position to be extended.

Gen’s symbolic reenactments of trauma drama inside the popular imagination were “the most
influential and iconic anti-war literature to reach successive postwar generations and shape
popular consciousness about the horrendous consequences of militarism in the past four decades.”
The manga volumes became the “vehicle for intergenerational transmission of anti-war sentiments.”
Hashimoto sees Gen as a Japanese “equivalent of Anne Frank’s story,” an immensely influential work
“that mobilizes empathy and pity” and whose “reinforcement effect works over the generational
cycle.”

In their study of "what came to be called the Katyn Massacre," Bartmanski and Eyerman carefully
detail the tangled, distorted, and fraught history of the killing of 14,500 Polish military
officers and over 7,000 other Polish citizens—representing a significant segment of the elite,
professional class of Polish society—by the Soviet army in April 1940.  Three years later, when
some of the corpses were discovered, the Soviets blamed the Germans for perpetrating the mass
killing.  This is the basic story the Soviets would claim for decades, with various levels of
tenacity, official decree, and threats to the families involved.  In the meantime, most if not all
of the families knew the truth: members of the Soviet army had killed their husbands, fathers,
brothers, sons, uncles, and nephews.  Knowledge of the truth needed to remain unspoken, under
threat of losing access to education, jobs, and a public life without harassment in Poland.  It
remained, for several decades, a personal sorrow and burden rather than a trauma that could be
collectively felt and talked about.  They write, "Cultural trauma became possible only when the
directly affected individuals and communities were able to express themselves, verbally and
visually, in a sustained way and project their personal tragedies onto the larger moral screen of
the nation."  Literal screens—ones that show films— as well as literature played a crucial role in
the extension of the trauma of the massacre and of the distortion of the truth from the affected
families to the Polish people and beyond.

The transformation of "Katyn" from an occurrence known to a few to a symbol of Polish collective
suffering depended on families becoming cultural agents "creating and sustaining the trauma
narrative" and on "intellectuals/politicians" who, after official suppression ended, could also
create, sustain, and spread the symbolization of "Katyn".  One of the most prominent of these
intellectual carriers is the well-known film director Andrzej Wajda, who depicted Katyn in a film
in 2007. Wajda (2008) emphasized the importance of “showing Katyn to the world” and aimed at
triggering moral and cultural shock.  The film’s plotting technique moved from the actual victims
of the Soviets’ mass murder to the suffering of their families, especially the wives and the
sisters of the victims.  Bartmanski and Eyerman elaborate:

Wajda, whose father was among those murdered in Kharkov, visualizes this aspect and reveals through
it the cold-blooded destruction of a particular life-world. By shifting the attention from the
soldiers themselves to those who loved them and whose loss was publicly unrecognized, he makes the
extension of sentiments and identification possible, and thereby reveals the existential depth of
the Katyn trauma. Staging the women as Antigones can be seen an instantiation of intertextuality
that renders the story potentially generalizable.


The performance of trauma via theatrical staging is the focus of Elizabeth Breese's examination of
performances of Waiting for Godot in the devastated urban settings of New Orleans and Sarajevo.
While acknowledging that “claims to fact” are indeed performative assertions that may not
themselves “correspond to something ‘real’,” Breese distinguishes between factual and aesthetic
trauma claims. Breese concentrates on how “carrier groups and social actors use art, in addition to
claims to fact, to construct claims to trauma” in order to illuminate the inner-workings of
dramatic performance.

Through expressive and artistic performance, social actors represent elements of their experience
and construct them as traumatic. Painting, dance, song, film, and drama do not accuse in the
political or juridical realm; social actors use artistic productions to ‘speak for’ and to
construct trauma … The productions of Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo and New Orleans are social
performances whose ‘success’ is not achieved in the register of factual truth. Like Picasso’s
Guernica and other artistic constructions and claims to trauma, the success, or ‘re-fusion,’ of the
social performance of trauma through Godot is achieved in the register of expressive aptness.


For Breese, Godot becomes a laboratory in which to examine how the dramatic logics of cultural
traumas get formulated; how their crystallization separates symbolic retellings from their actual
point of origin; how such dramatic narrations subsequently are evoked in other, not precisely
similar, situations; and how these iterations have the potential to make concretely different
situations seem the same, giving mean to collective wounds via an iconic drama’s performative
effect. Working inside this laboratory of aesthetic innovation, Breese can offer a new reading of
Becket’s most famous play. It was “born out of Beckett’s personal trauma” of exile during Nazi
occupation,” she suggests, and also from “the mood of collective trauma in Paris following the
war.” The master-slave pairing of Pozzo and Lucky, and the coupling of the desperate but ever
hopeful Vladimir and Estragon, were “rendered and read in Paris as a reference to the collective
trauma of Parisians at the time.” Instead of Godot as absurd drama without reference, Breese sees
Beckett’s “famously ‘meaningless’ play” as something utterly different – an artistic rendering of
the trauma-filled twentieth century.

Beckett’s trauma-text gained worldwide fame for aesthetic reasons that were social at the same
time. By its spare and careful plot, oblique dialogue, and minimalist staging, the play moves from
the specifics of a concrete situation to the essential tensions of the human condition. Yet, like
every trauma narrative, drama, to gain traction in particular trauma situation Godot must be
implanted in a concrete time and place. Here Breese gives to audience an active role.

Audiences and producers insert meanings … by specifying victims, perpetrators, and the nature of
their trauma … The audiences to these productions of Waiting for Godot pronounced the performances
a success or failure based on the performances’ ability to express and depict the experiences of
the residents in each city … Audiences expect the actors to embody Vladimir and Estragon, sure, but
there was a simultaneous expectation that they personify the residents of the city as well.


In New Orleans and Sarajevo, Breese demonstrates, successful performances of Godot “turned theater
performance into social performance of trauma.” This is, of course, exactly what every cultural
creator hopes their performance will be.

                               Trauma Dramas Are Performed, not Described

            Collective traumas are reflections neither of individual suffering nor actual event,
but symbolic renderings that reconstruct and imagine them in a relatively independent way. This
spiral of signification is the work of culture creators, who create scripts that answer the four
“w” questions: what happened, who were its victims, who were its perpetrators, and what can be
done. These scripts are not descriptions of what is; they are arguments for what must have been
and, at least implicitly, of what should be. The truth of cultural scripts emerges, not from their
descriptive accuracy, but from the power of their enactment. Trauma scripts are performed as
symbolic actions in the theatres of everyday collective life. In Serbia, the crisis of the 1980s
began with Milosevic’s supposedly factual and certainly highly expressive, virulently nationalist
speech commemorating the Serbia’s defeat by the Islamic forces in a largely mythical war. In
postwar Germany, a turning point in trauma construction arrived with the sentimental but compelling
fictional television series Holocaust. In the wake of the Sabra and Shatila massacres after
Israeli’s 1982 Lebanon War, it was not only the public war of words between right-wing Likud
officials and their Peace Now critics that allowed the Holocaust narrative to be extended to
Palestinians for the first time. It was the extraordinary and unprecedented ritual of the “400,000
protest,” the spectacle of hundreds of thousands of patriotic but outraged Israelis massively
protesting in a Tel Aviv square.[4]

Rui Gao’s analysis of China’s “Speaking Bitterness” campaigns provides a particularly vivid
illustration of trauma texts in their performative mode. From the early 1950s onward, the CCP’s
narrative of interclass trauma were consummated in what Rui Gao describes as an “ubiquitous
performative mechanism where the drama was not only written and read, but also performed and
recited by real people on a daily basis.”

Consecutive national campaigns demanded “struggle meetings,” rituals of confrontation that were
“enacted at all levels up from the local communities.” In a “Speaking Bitterness” performance, “the
‘drama’ could be literally put on show and the ‘bitterness’ reenacted on a ‘stage.’” The trauma
script of bitterness “rose beyond cognitive argument and demanded the acute physical presence,
emotional involvement and performative action of the audience.” In the 1960s, Chinese junior high
school textbooks contained what purport to be descriptions of the actual proceedings of a
bitterness ritual called “Struggling Han Lao Liu.” In her interpretation of this event, Gao
emphasizes the salience of “the absolute coding and weighting of the chief antagonist, the target
of the struggle, landlord Han.”

When the meeting began, the landlord was brought to the center of the courtyard where a certain
kind of stage was set for the “struggle,” and one by one, people who felt that they had been wrong,
oppressed, or persecuted by the landlord came up to the stage to give a public testimony to the
unforgivable sins of the evildoer. The ritual started as the first figure, a young man named Yan
San, stepped into the central stage. He testified that Han had once attempted to force him [to
work] as a slave laborer for the Japanese colonizers, and when he refused and ran away, Han
retaliated by sending his mum into prison [and she] eventually died there. “’I want to take my
revenge for my mum today!’ as Yang San bellowed with anger,” the chapter goes; “people around all
cried out, ‘Let’s beat him to death!’ and started to push forwards with sticks to the center of the
courtyard.” “Their chorus,” it goes on, was like “the thunder of spring roaring in the sky” …. When
the last bitterness speaker finished her story by yelling “give me back my son!” it was written
that “men and women all pushed forward, crying that they want their sons, husbands, fathers,
brothers back. And the sounds of weeping, crying, beating and cursing all mixed together.” Indeed,
the scene was so intense and moving that Xiao Wang, a young member of the land reform team who came
from outside the village, “kept wiping his tears with the back of his hand.”


In their study of Greek identity and the partition of the island of Cyprus, Roudometof and Christou
address what Hashimoto calls "intergenerational transmission" of trauma constructions. They ask:
how is it that people yearn to return to a home and a homeland which they themselves have never
known? The question itself reveals that the experience of displacement of Greek Cypriots from the
north of the island to the south is not an individual trauma, but a collective one. Roudometof and
Christou describe the commemorative practices, especially within Greek Cyrpiot schools, which serve
to introduce children to the trauma of separation from their homeland and narrate it as the trauma
of all Greek Cypriots, for those who moved from their homes to the southern part of Cyprus as well
as for successive generations. "For Greek Cypriots," Roudometof and Christou write, "the experience
of uprootedness and the vision of a mythical day of return are the two major characteristics of the
'1974' cultural trauma."  The collective trauma of leaving behind their original lands—always
remembered as beautiful, fertile lands—and the hope of returning to them is integrated into many
facets of school, from classroom decorations to school assemblies; "the whole curriculum,"
Roudometof and Christou explain, "is infused with references to the problem of occupation."  In the
Greek Cypriot school curriculum, as in religious rituals and in popular culture, the partition of
Cyprus is not merely described as a problem of politics or property; it is performed as a problem
of Greek Cypriot identity.

            In Colombia, purely textual narrations of the trauma suffered by the thousands of
innocent kidnap victims seemed largely without performative effect. A 33-year old computer science
engineer named Oscar Morales responded with horror and sympathy to an iconic representation of the
suffering—a ghostly image of Ingrid Betancourt, the French victim of FARC guerillas photographed in
the jungle chained to a tree. Morales created a Facebook page called “One Million Voices against
the FARC,” calling for a protest march that eventually drew ten million people into the streets in
115 cities around the world. An even more dramatic portrait of the narrative enactment of trauma in
Colombia is the story Tognato tells about Gustavo Moncayo, the 55-year old high school teacher who
in 2006 began publicly to wear chains at his writs and neck to protest FARC’s kidnapping of his
son. A year later, after FARC assassinated eleven regional congressmen in captivity, Moncayo set
out on foot for Bogota in what became a nationally arresting pilgrimage of protest.

He started his march in the middle of a generalized neglect and without support of any institution
– social, political, religious or economic. But then he managed to catch public attention. The
media would accompany him along the track. People impatiently awaited his arrival. They applauded
him, hugged, touched him, took photos with him, asked for autographs, dedicated local folk songs to
him, donated money, and offered food. … Towards the end of his march, his arrival [in Bogota] was
announced on the radio and schools would stop their classes. The march lasted forty-six days. Even
the FARC acknowledged that his gesture was “valiant.” When he got to Bogota, Moncayo met with the
President and the Mayor of the city. At the end of 2007, he was awarded the National Peace Prize.
Though his painful march did not manage to obtain the liberation of his son, he managed … to
command the attention and the solidarity of broad and diverse segments of the Colombian society.


                            Trauma Dramas Have“Material”Repercussions:

                                    Polarization or  Reconciliation?

The relative independence of collective narration of trauma from individual experience and
historical event, the intervening agency of culture creators, the performative impact of textual
enactment – these social facts explain why and how trauma dramas have such extraordinarily powerful
effects on the organization and structure of our social worlds. Would Germany have engaged in such
democratic and pro-Western politics if the Allies’ wartime city bombs rather than the Holocaust had
become central to its postwar collective identity?  Would an economically empowered Japan have
chosen to remain demilitarized if its own postwar trauma dramas, from nationalist to cosmopolitan,
had not enshrined war in such a polluted way?  Would Maoism have achieved such sustained
legitimacy, despite its political repression and disastrous economic policies, if class-trauma had
not been so strenuously narrated and so relentlessly performed? Would Serbia have invaded its
neighbors and so threatened its Islamic minority if the Kosovo Myth had not aligned its struggle
for collective identity in such a xenophobic and militaristic way? Simply to ask these questions is
see how the cultural constructions of trauma often play out in world-historical ways.

Trauma dramas can be consensual or polarizing. In the former, they may lead to social
reconciliation; in the latter, to divisive conflict and traumatic injury on a wider scale.
Institutionalizing a dominant trauma narrative is a singular social accomplishment. It stabilizes
not only collective memory but the contemporary sense of social reality, pointing the way forward
in a confident way. Unfortunately, this seems to be the exception rather than the rule in the
history of injuries that has afflicted humanity’s collective life.

Perhaps more than any other bloody event in the last century’s dark history, the Holocaust would
seem to qualify as an event whose meaning cannot be open to doubt or contestation. Yet, while the
Holocaust was certainly experienced as an indelible horror by its Jewish victims, its collective
configuration has been contingent and shifting. For the Western non-Jewish community, the Nazi mass
murder was initially understood within the context of the Second World War, as perhaps the most
brutal but still representative incident of that world wide mid-century war. Over time,
symbolization began shifting from a war crime rooted in a particular time and space to a universal
event of such singular evil that it moved beyond history and territory to become a moral lesson
“for all mankind.”  The legendary status of the Holocaust as a sacred evil inspired international
human rights laws, new restrictions on national sovereignty, and newly powerful moral strictures
against ethnic and racial cleansing.

Yet, even as this markedly universalizing construction became ever more deeply institutionalized in
Western Europe and North America, the Holocaust came to be configured in a radically
particularistic manner in Israel and the Middle East. For Arab nations neighboring the new Jewish
nation, for occupied Palestinians inside Israel or in exile, and for radical Islamicists the world
wide, the Holocaust’s reality was fiercely challenged and the extraordinary nature of Jewish trauma
ridiculed and denied. Meanwhile, inside the boundaries of the Jewish state, religiously
conservative Jews and politically right-wing Zionists came to understand the Holocaust as a tragedy
that was unique to the Jewish people, not as a tragedy of our times. This Israeli version of the
Holocaust trauma drama reinforced ethnic and religious boundaries rather pointing to the necessity
for transcending them. Because it would be foolish for Jews to trust the world, they would need
their own state, and they must exercise eternal vigilance against Arabs, Islamicists, and
especially Palestinian Arabs, whose very existence constituted a permanent threat to the Jewish
state from the outside. Jeff Alexander and Shai Dromi describe “a self-justifying, narrowly
particularistic, and deeply primordial reconstruction of the Holocaust trauma, one that continues
to exert great influence up to this day.” In this narrative, the Jewish fighters who founded Israel
and continue to defend it are cast as protagonists.

Arrayed against them is the long list of their historical antagonists: the Germans and their
accomplices; the British, who stood between Jewish refugees and the soon-to-be-Israelis; the allied
Forces, who intervened too late and failed to save European Jews from the Final solution;
Arab-Palestinians and the surrounding nations, who opposed the establishment of the Jewish State;
and Europeans, who resented the Jewish survivors and greeted their return to their original
residences with several post-war Pogroms. [This] Jewish-Israeli narrative reinforces the
militaristic and exclusionary aspects of Zionism. Foreign nations have proved to be untrustworthy.
Israel can rely only on the resources of the Jewish people and its own military strength to defend
itself.


Such trauma construction inspired Israelis’ reluctance to share “their” land with Palestinians, and
it fuelled intense investments in military over diplomatic strategy.

The autonomy of event and referent, however, also allowed the relation between Holocaust and Israel
to be reconfigured in a sharply different way. Alexander and Dromi show how much more moderate
versions of Zionism gradually emerged. Less exculpatory narratives and their performative
enactments challenged the particularistic construction of Jews as primordial victims. Eventually,
post-Zionist narratives crystallized assigning Israelis a perpetrator role in a Middle Eastern
trauma drama and Palestinians victim status. These more universalizing symbolic constructions were,
no doubt, partly responsive to Israeli military reversals and the PLO’s mobilizing success. “The
new post-1973 context,” Alexander and Dromi write, “allowed the tragic construction of the
Holocaust trauma to provide a different kind of script, one that could connect Jewish Israelis with
Palestinian suffering.” But these new trauma narrations were not determined by situational events.
Cultural agency and performative enactment took pride of place. Novelists, movie makers, and
painters created new fictions that mandated pity and sympathy for the Palestinian plight. After the
Sabra and Shatila massacres, Amos Oz, a leading Israeli author of fiction and nonfiction, wrote an
open letter to Prime Minister Began.

Often I, like many Jews, find at the bottom of my soul a dull sense of pain because I did not kill
Hitler with my own hands. [But] tens of thousands of dead Arabs will not heat that wound … Again
and again, Mr. Begin, you reveal to the public eye a strange urge to resuscitate Hitler in order to
kill him every day anew in the guise of terrorists.


In the years following, revisionist Israeli historians challenged one-sided accounts of the birth
of their nation. An Israeli peace movement emerged that put land for peace on the table. As the
occupation continued for decades, a new generation of righteous intellectuals and activists
indignantly exposed Israeli complicity in Palestinian suffering, sometimes drawing bitter analogies
between reactionary Jewish political and military leaders seemingly bent on Palestinian destruction
and Nazis responsible for the traumatic destruction of European Jews in the century before.

                                                -----------------

We hope this brief introduction substantiates our initial claim that the following contributions
amplify propositions about cultural trauma and collective identity we developed in our earlier
work.[5] They depart from that earlier foundational theorizing, however, in two ways, one
historical, the other civilizational.

Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity was researched and written in the decade that followed upon
the end of the Cold War, a period marked by progressive narratives, widespread hopes for a new
world order, and what now appears to been mostly wishful thinking about the dawn of a new day. The
intellectual efforts composing the current volume are published in a decidedly less hopeful time.
They largely conceptualize and explain a recent history that has been marked by the return of the
same kinds of heinous events and social suffering that scarred the century before. As a result, the
outcomes of cultural trauma traced in this book have less to do with overcoming schism and civil
repair and more to do with how trauma construction so frequently crystallizes polarizing
narratives, exacerbates conflict, and leads to even more suffering in turn.  Many of the chapters
that follow explain how cultural traumas can continue without closure.  Moncayo's son returned home
in 2010 almost three years after Moncayo's march, but thousands like him have not, and many will
not, return home, and Colombians increasingly experience this as an affront not only to families
but to society.  The island of Cyprus remains divided, and Greek Cypriots wish for homelands from
which they are ever more temporally, though not emotionally, removed.

The second distinctive difference of the present volume is that its case studies are devoted more
to the “East” and the “South” than to the “North” and the “West.” Our earlier work examined slavery
in the U.S. and the Holocaust trauma in America and Western Europe, with some discussion of
post-Communism as well. Contributors to the present volume look at trauma processes in China and
Japan, in Colombia and South Africa, in Cyprus and Greece, in pre-1989 Poland, and in Serbia and
Israel. This empirical variation gives us more confidence that cultural trauma theory is not
ethnocentric, that it captures the significant processes that mark a class of powerfully affecting,
if historically bounded, social facts.

Neither greater empirical variation nor increased theoretical strength, however, produces an
increment in normative terms. The moral benefit of cultural trauma is not to be found in the
starlight of the scientific firmament, but in ourselves.
________________________________

[1] Cite 2004

[2] In Doctor Faustus, symbolically situated and actually written in the waning years of the WWII
and published just after its conclusion, Thomas Mann (1997 [1947]) contests the right of Germans to
protest against the “earth-shaking, plummeting havoc” that not only killed hundreds of thousands of
Germans but ended its claim to represent kultur.: “We have experienced the destruction of our
venerable cities from the air – an act that would scream to the heavens were not we who suffer it
ourselves laden with guilt. But since we are[,] the scream dies in the air and, like King
Claudius’s prayer, can ‘never to heaven go.’ How strange that lament for culture, raised now
against crimes that we called down upon ourselves, sounds in the mouths of those who entered the
arena of history proclaiming themselves bearers of a barbarism that, while wallowing in
ruthlessness, was to rejuvenate the world” (p. 184).

[3] For how this trauma process prevented the Nanking massacre from becoming a postwar focal point
in local and global discussions of genocide, see Alexander and Gao, “xxxxx,” in xxx, Oxford
Handbook of Cultural Sociology.

[4] See Alexander and Dromi below, chapter XX.

[5] These contributions also support the series of subsequent works that have appeared between our
initial collaboration in 1998-99 and the present volume. See, e.g., Eyerman 2001, Giesen 2004,
Goodman 2008, etc?